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Opinion Giving Women a Voice Is Powerful Message for High Holidays
Each year when I sit in synagogue during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I’m struck by the complex stories we read about biblical women and by the wisdom these stories offer about ensuring the dignity of women and girls today. The past year was one of paradoxes. At a time when Sheryl Sandberg, Malala Yousafzai,…
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Life Blotting Out Female Bodies From Textbooks
In their ongoing quest to obliterate all signs of women from public life, religious Jews in Israel have now decided that the female reproductive system is obscene and have removed it from their science textbooks. As Haaretz reports, “the Education Ministry has asked textbook publishers to eliminate chapters on human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually…
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Breaking News Israeli Science Textbook Publishers Ordered To Censor Human Reproduction
The Education Ministry has asked textbook publishers to eliminate chapters on human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually transmitted diseases from science textbooks used in state religious junior high schools as well as from their teacher manuals, Haaretz has learned. Several publishers have already started making the changes, which were requested in late June. The revised…
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Opinion A Truce in the Kotel Wars?
The ongoing drama over who is allowed to pray at the Western Wall, and where, and how, and under what circumstances, encapsulates all that divides and distresses the Jewish people today, and all that can unify us. We understand the skeptics and cynics. We appreciate how difficult it will be to pry control over what…
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Life The Benefit of the Doubt for The New Year
In Rosh Hashanahs past, I focused on changes that required adding a new practice to my Jewish life. Nine years ago I bought a second set of dishes. Eight years ago I committed to weekly Torah study sessions with a partner. Seven years ago I began using the mikveh. I’ve made less daunting changes, too,…
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Life Tanning, the American Dream?
I don’t tan. Actively or passively. I mean, I don’t put on a bikini and spread myself out on a towel in the path of the sun, nor does my skin turn to bronze should it be exposed to the sun. For years, for most of my life really, I saw this as a problem….
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News Is Western Wall Prayer Platform Step Forward for Women — Or Back?
For more than a decade, Jews have been permitted to hold egalitarian prayer services at a southern section of the Western Wall that lies out of sight of Orthodox worshippers. But the area, known as Robinson’s Arch in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, never became a government-supported prayer facility. Worshippers have always been guests of the…
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Life Making Jewish Traditions My Own
This is the first post in a series by Johnna Kaplan exploring aspects of Jewish life outside of her own experience. Although I am proud to define myself as Jewish, that definition centers on what I care about and how I think, not so much what I do. There are many traditionally Jewish things, like,…
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Film & TV Bonhoeffer biopic tells of a pastor turned would-be Hitler assassin — but is the story true?
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
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News What Mike Huckabee’s ‘Kids Guide to Israel’ says about his views
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Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Netanyahu was right to end the war in Lebanon — now Gaza must follow
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Culture 10 wicked ways to avoid talking about Gaza and Trump this Thanksgiving
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Fast Forward Israeli security cabinet approves ceasefire with Hezbollah, paving way for end of yearlong conflict in Israel’s north
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Culture Who are the most (and least) Jewish Peanuts characters?
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